


Down Together

by midnightflame



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Flashbacks, Gen, I Love You, Implied Relationships, The Black Paladins, how to save a life, season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 05:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14948246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightflame/pseuds/midnightflame
Summary: There are things you let go of, and then there are the ones so intricately woven into the very fabric of your being that letting go means taking the fall too.





	Down Together

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still not over S6. At all. Or these two boys. /sob As always feel from to come yell at me over [on twitter](https://twitter.com/ByMidnightFlame) (beware some S6 spoilers right now!)
> 
> [And have another song for some good Sheith](https://open.spotify.com/track/33z4pEY6IdugtNDHUq95gG).

_“My name is Takashi Shirogane, and this place here is the Galaxy Garrison. Welcome home, Keith."_

*

This is how it all ends. At least, he’s seen stories just like this, with the collapse of a life set to the tune of a building breaking apart, alarms screaming their red-coated warnings, and explosions threatening to reduce it all down to ash (as if some cinematic god out there decreed that this is the best way to represent these sorts of demises). And at the very center of it all, a clash of epic making. Only this one didn’t have its roots sunk down into some shadow-stained past where intents were never quite what they seemed, or petty jealousies soured the One True Friendship of a lifetime.

Keith looks around him. At this world falling apart. The one he never knew about. There’s no real rhyme to it all, just a senseless rhythm with bits (right now, a row of cryopod chambers housing soulless vessels with their familiar faces) breaking off to crash down into something else below. Another platform, maybe. Or dirt and rock, after a seemingly endless fall towards the planet below. He won’t hear those impacts though. 

You don’t always hear the hurts that bruise another. Don’t always see them either.

Metal groans under the strain of weight it was never meant to carry. Above him, something else bursts like a pipe filled with too much water, too much pressure. A resounding boom echoes across space. Debris rains from the sky like the scales of a metalwork dragon.

Neither of them was supposed to be leaving from here. That had been the plan at least. Not his.

Shiro’s. 

And Shiro had always seemed to have a plan. They just never left worlds obliterated in their wakes. The bigger worlds that is. Because war always devastated someone’s world, the microcosms that fed into the macrosystems that came together to make up the universe. But those small worlds, the ones that existed between just two people?

Sometimes they were the universe. 

Entire solar systems contained in one body, galaxies dotting a single mind with glimmers of light from long-dead stars (because isn’t that all the past ever was - hopes propelled through space and time to shine for those who wouldn’t see them for years to come?), planets made of emotions that orbited around the heart that guided them all. 

Shiro has always been his universe, and Keith can’t rightly say when it became that way. Just one day, as all good stories start, he realized that there was more to him than just the anger and the frustrations of an untethered existence. That he was more than just an orphaned soul, who lost home too young and met The World too soon after. At one point, Keith realized that love still existed in this world, and it had burst into existence in the form of a man who had never played himself as savior. And he could have. Keith would have let him too, but Shiro had never fallen prey to that particular title. He remained human so Keith could learn to be human as well, and their threads had been irrevocably woven together since. 

True though, that he is still himself. He is Keith, and Shiro is still Shiro (even if he’s a mess of a man right now, and where others might have said monster, Keith only sees a soul fractured by the machinations of an empire that have been greater than them both but would not break them together). And there are things between them that this universe could never claim to own.

*

_“Have you ever been on a hoverbike?"_

Keith shook his head. He could have said no, but words were still something he was struggling to trust, and it took a lot of trust to loosen your tongue sometimes. Even more to loosen up your heart. But the head shake seemed to have been taken well because Shiro smiled down at him like it was a perfectly fine answer to give.

_“You’re about to get your first taste of desert track then.”_

*

His chest aches. 

It’s more than just the burning that hits your lungs when you’ve been going too fast for too long, and your body wants to tell you that at some point something here is going to give. It sits deeper than that. The scorching pain is only surface level. Beyond that, past the gateway into the other realm where heart meets soul, Keith feels his memories coalescing around this being called Shiro. It’s building itself up to something. Memory first, as the base layer. 

Because memory tells him what is truth when untruths start igniting in the air around him. It tells him what he’s felt, what he’s known of this man, and in the face of the breakdown of Takashi Shirogane, Keith finds his old fears silent. 

But what ground does fear have to stand on when everything worth saving in this universe is threatening to crumble right before you? 

So, memory first. Then after that, faith. 

He doesn’t balk under the attacks, doesn’t try to run and hide and hope this might all be nothing more than a bad dream. Just like the ones that used to plague him years ago - coming home to empty houses, to locked doors, to promised places with his name scratched out and his position usurped by someone better than a fight-ready brat with no history to make any decent claims on. Faith is what Shiro carried for him until Keith was ready to carry it for himself. 

His chest aches. His body sings quiet lullabies of pain. And his gaze holds steady on the man threatening to bring down his world.

*

_“You do know there’s more where that came from, right?”_

Shiro was laughing at him, but it had the same sort of warmth to it that the desert did just after sundown. It was a heat that nestled itself inside of Keith’s chest and made him feel like he had inherited the ability to glow from the inside out. Even if it was a scowl that greeted Shiro’s words and not some shining beacon of a grin.

 _“More mren,”_ he answered around a mouthful.

_“Swallow your food before you ask for more, Keith."_

Shiro was still laughing as he spoke, and there was this smile on his lips that made Keith feel like home could never be that far away from him again as long as he remembered that look. He swallowed his food, wiped at his mouth with his shirt sleeve, and held out his bowl towards Shiro.

_“More. . .please.”_

A blush suffused over his cheeks, fresh and pink as peonies in bloom, but he made sure not to drop his gaze from Shiro’s when asking. Because that was important. Letting someone know you saw them, and he always saw Shiro. With a ruffle of his hair, Shiro laughed again and took Keith’s bowl.

 _“Didn’t think you’d like mac and cheese this much. Not that I can complain,”_ Shiro said as he spooned in a portion so generous it made Keith’s eyes grow wide and his stomach reconsider its ability to digest. _“It’s my favorite too.”_

*

Worlds fall apart. Or sometimes they threaten to only to realize there are things corded through the bits and pieces of what they’re trying to tear down that keep them from collapsing as intended.

The world around him **is** falling apart. There’s little left of this research station, and by the time the self-destruct protocols are done with it, Keith knows it will be nothing more than the hollowed out remains of a nightmare neither of them will be able to forget. Perhaps, years down the line, it will sleep dormant in the bottoms of their souls, like some old war dog too decrepit to even snarl at a disturbance. 

Right now though, it is very much alive. And if he could, he would have reached out, put hands to skin and let his touch wake the dreams they had built together. Instead, he is staring up through a crossing of swords into a gaze that knows him but refuses to see.

But sometimes, you need someone else to look at the world for you. To look past the breakdown of the moments that broke you, the moments that tried to rob you. 

Right now, he had to be the person that believed in living for them both. Because there are things you let go of, and then there are the ones so intricately woven into the very fabric of your being that letting go means taking the fall too. He pushes back against Shiro. The ache in his chest unfurls, large as a lotus blossom, filling his lungs, his breath, and finally his words. 

It starts with Memory. 

Then Faith. 

And last of all -

“I love you.”


End file.
